Burden me! Burden me! Though I admit that it might very well have taken me a while to get it back to you. So in the interest of quick publishing... >;}

Oh, but I recently offered to proofread the short story of a friend of mine, without really thinking about what that would entail. His work's... rather rough. I realized very quickly that the nature of my comments would be very different from what I've grown used to writing. A lot more about grammar; a lot more about style; a lot more about character development rather than refinement of character depiction. Skimming it, realizing to my horror that I'd forgotten that not everyone can write as well as pauraque... I feel like this work is a lamb I must eviscerate to divine the story from its entrails, not some mature thing that needs my touch to groom it....... And I really, really need to come up with some way to express my bizarre fixation with extended metaphor other than lj comments.... But anyway, you get the picture. >:}

(And don't you just hate it when it's something a person's bursting with pride for, because others have told him it's wonderful, but you have to say, cringing, 'To be honest, my dear, and don't take this the wrong way...')